What does the "role of the media in the reproduction of crime" refer to?

Question

What does the "role of the media in the reproduction of crime" refer to?

I am assuming this is referring to moral panics and deviancy amplification, and the interplay between the media and policy-making.

Answer 1

The media picks what information gets delivered based on interest and money. If a girl is believed to be kidnapped  in a town that story would be in every single station. Now take that same girl and instead she is believed to run away, the story does not even make the back of the newspaper. if you think about it the story does not change but the perception does. The parents are still missing their girl, but the news feels people would lose interest because she ran away instead of being kidnapped.

Lets keep the same story just to show how the media plays a role on the reproduction of crime or at least the perception of it. Lets say this story comes from a small town. In the news this story becomes an epidemic, and tries to draw all of the viewers in. How? they give us updates with no information, they give us information about the people surrounding the area. They give us a quick biography about the entire family. So what happens our perception becomes, that this town's crime rate is a lot higher, and needs to be resolved. Now that was probably the only girl missing in the past five years in the town, but now the news make you feel like this situation happens every day.

Now lets sadly assume the girl was found dead in the river. Now the whole town thinks this situation is very common, and something must be done. The government feels the pressure and signs a bill that prohibits more of our "freedoms" to protect us. Years later we find out the girl was kidnapped and murdered by her father. But now is too late, everyone in town is afraid for their kid, hoping that bad man that does not exist takes their kid. The whole town agrees to losing some more of their rights simply because they do not have to worry about a crime that would probably never happen in that neighborhood.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention now the news would report this same crime in a different angle that shows a new epidemic about family member kidnapping their kids. So new laws get passed, and it keeps going. At the end of the day, three new laws were passed for one incident that never happened before in the entire town. The perception is now that the town has suffered two bad epidemics and is not as safe. When in reality it was just one sick man that killed his daughter.

All because the media was able to persuade the people and government that the situation was a lot worse than it was. We as humans see the same story over and over and start believing that these events are taking place repeatedly.

Just think of all the high school shootings, I'll let you look up how many actually have happened. After doing that compare that number to the one you thought and you would see. The actual numbers are not as bad as we feel they are. Thank You media. I'm not saying there are not problems we must concern ourselves about, but the media makes them feel a lot worse than they are. Also look at the time gaps of the shootings and you would see they do not happen as often as we feel they do. I admit one is too many, but we have not suffered these tragedies as much as Mr. Media wants us to believe.